King asks poor Swazis to pay for 11 palaces for wives

He did not get a private jet, but King Mswati III has found another way to drain Swaziland's treasury: a palace for each of his 11 wives.

Sub-saharan Africa's last absolute monarch has reportedly asked his government for £8m to redecorate three royal palaces and build 11 new ones - a big sum for a tiny country reeling from drought, food shortages and HIV/Aids.

Most of the wives share a single palace and occupy guest houses, but before he marries again the king has decided to give each spouse her own home.

The Times of Swaziland said the 35-year-old monarch had asked the cabinet and parliament to approve funding. News agencies quoted an unnamed palace source as confirming the story.

If the projects go ahead it will be a comeback of sorts for a king who was unexpectedly forced by protests last year to abandon plans to buy a £24m executive jet.

He recently bought a fleet of BMWs costing £800,000 for his relatives.

A former British protectorate of 1.1 million people, wedged between South Africa and Mozambique, Swaziland is peaceful and has a relatively good infrastructure. But the HIV rate of 39% is the world's second highest after Botswana. With many peasants too sick to farm, the food shortage and grinding poverty have been compounded by one of the worst droughts in memory. The UN's World Food Programme, which feeds a quarter of the population, said harvests would decline for a fifth successive year.

The king has resisted pressure for greater political plurality and triggered one controversy after another, including the alleged abduction of an 18-year-old schoolgirl, Zena Mahlangu, to be his ninth bride.

Yet the influence of opposition groups is limited: the cabinet and parliament are packed with the king's relatives and judges have been sacked en masse for allegedly challenging his authority.

He remains popular with many Swazis, however, who see him as a virile father-figure. His late father, King Sobhuza II, amassed 99 wives and sired more than 200 children.